About

Mechanical Design Laboratory – NTUA

The Lab

The Mechanical Design Laboratory supports education, research and applied engineering in the analysis, design, development and validation of mechanical systems.

NTUA Mechanical Engineering Building M

Laboratory Profile

The Laboratory of Machine Elements at NTUA was established in 1941 and is one of the oldest laboratories of the School of Mechanical Engineering.

Its work is rooted in machine elements and mechanical design, with activity in gears, transmissions, tribology, metrology, additive manufacturing, biomechanics and applied engineering projects.

Today, the lab combines teaching, diploma-thesis and PhD supervision, research and external collaborations, following a practical design path from concept and simulation to prototype, measurement and validation.

Undergraduate teaching

Machine Elements I & II; Transport and Lifting Machines; Principles of Mechanical Design; Hydraulic and Pneumatic Systems; Design for Additive Manufacturing and Applications; Operation and Maintenance Management; Analysis of Mechanical Structures I & II; Operating Systems and Programming Languages; and Signal Processing in Mechanical Systems.

Postgraduate teaching

Stochastic Finite Element Methods; Machine Learning in Computational Mechanics; Biomechanics; and Electromechanical Systems.

Research, Design and Education

MD-Lab supports the full mechanical-design cycle, from engineering concept and computational analysis to prototype realization, experimental validation and applied collaboration.

  • Design and analysisMachine elements, transmissions, mechanisms and mechanical structures are studied through analytical, CAD/CAE and computational methods.
  • Manufacturing and validationPrototypes, test fixtures and experimental setups are produced, measured and tested using the lab’s workshop, metrology and instrumentation infrastructure.
  • Teaching and collaborationDiploma theses, PhD research, research projects and partner work connect academic training with applied engineering problems.

Selected images from the laboratory’s infrastructure, research and project work, highlighting the main engineering areas supported by MD-Lab.

Plastic gears meshing on an FZG-type test rig
Gears and power transmissions
Wet clutch engagement test rig
Testing and Tribology
FDM printers in the MD-Lab
Additive manufacturing and prototyping
Coordinate measuring machine inspecting an engineered component
Metrology and reverse engineering
Pilot intraoperative use of the acetabular cup medialization tool
Biomedical devices and surgical tools
Timelapse GIF of the 3BUILD construction-scale 3D printing process
Applied mechanisms and construction systems

Further Information

For more detail, continue to the people, equipment, research and project pages.

Staff Equipment Research Projects